The true story of how I went from really bad to pretty good

In my full time role, I am a professor in a school of education, which, by the way is an industry obsessed with “outcomes.” There are outcomes for students (Are you College and Career Ready?) and outcomes for teachers (Are you Highly Effective?). And then, just to ensure that everyone feels the pressure every single day, we benchmark those outcomes over time, so that we all know whether you are ON TRACK.

There are lots of really good (and some bad) reasons for this but this post is not about whether the “Era of Accountability” is good or bad for the education community. This post is about a fundamental underpinning* of this obsession with outcomes. There is an assumption that these labels (like “highly effective” for teachers or “college and career ready” for students) represent accomplishments that are straightforward and permanent once attained.

It is possible– nay, it is REQUIRED– that you cross a threshold into a permanent state of having figured “IT” out. And this concept is introduced very, very early. Consider that pervasive question of early childhood: “What do you want to BE when you GROW UP?” This assumes that someday you will arrive at adulthood and you finally BE something.

Let me ask you: Are YOU College and Career Ready?

Don’t you sometimes struggle to make your deadlines? Do you maybe spend a few more minutes (hours?) on Facebook than you should? And while we are at it, can you fully articulate arguments warranted by scientific evidence that you’ve personally deconstructed?

Is there a skill that you should have that you don’t, maybe something you hide from you friends or colleagues (“I can’t actually type” or “I really don’t know how to do ANYTHING in Excel”)?

Here’s another one: Are you all grown up and finally “SOMEONE?” You’ve got it all figured out, right? You are totally the career and family person that you always intended to be, fiscally and emotionally stable, completely committed to your budget and eating wholesome home cooked meals every night. Right? If you are this person, then I probably don’t actually know you. While all of us have lots of things figure out, nobody I know has it all figure out.

I believe that people premise their life on the idea that someday they’ll be done, accomplished, excellent and ready. And then as they keep waiting and waiting to get there they become embarrassed and ashamed. This, I believe, is damaging to young people who are capable of A LOT and should just get down to it… now. And I think its damaging to old people (like me) who want to run away from new opportunities because they believe either:

I should already know how to do this and if I try to do it now everyone will see that I’m a novice and I’ll be discovered as the fraud that I actually, deeply, am. Impostor syndrome, anyone?

My time for being a novice is over. I’ll be so old by the time I can actually do that thing (play the piano, speak french, solve matrix algebra, run a marathon), it will hardly be worth it.

Here’s what I have to stay to that: BULLSHIT.

If I don’t NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE. I’ve lived my whole life based on this premise– I’ve rushed against the clock trying to reach expert status before it was too late… only to discover now that I’m here that there’s a million other things to learn.

I have two options:

I can sit down and cry, declaring myself a failure stuck on the hamster wheel of accomplishment.

I can throw out the whole paradigm and see life as a chance to learn a lot of new things, starting at lots of different times. A learning experience that never ends!

What to do?

Well, it’s actually a pretty easy choice because here’s the cruel twist on our story: expertise, accomplishment, accolades and respect (according to people who study such things) come by way of constantly being a novice. Trying new things and being willing to fail are the prerequisites to innovation and creativity which, as you know, are the cornerstones of success in an information economy.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Trying new things and being willing to fail are the prerequisites to innovation and creativity.” quote=”Trying new things and being willing to fail are the prerequisites to innovation and creativity.”]

So, the world will ask you to live on the premise that you need to ARRIVE while success comes from constantly moving, changing and growing. The world is a jerky jerk.

As a community, we need to throw this paradigm out the window. This requires cold turkeying the whole idea of “arriving” and replacing it with a commitment to continuous improvement. I do a little today, so I can do a little bit more tomorrow. Eventually I’ll do so much that other people will say things like “You’re such an inspiration” and “How do you have time to do so much?”

[clickToTweet tweet=”We need to cold turkey the whole idea of “arriving” and replace it with a commitment to continuous improvement.'” quote=”We need to cold-turkey the whole idea of “arriving” and replace it with a commitment to continuous improvement.'”]

Though I’ve been preaching the importance of having a growth mindset for years, I have really learned the power of continuous improvement as I took up this crazy idea of starting a business. Here is something that I learned the “hard (fun)” way of doing it really badly and then getting slowly better at it until (in an unexpectedly short amount of time) I felt comfortable doing it in a professional capacity.

Visual Artistry

I am not a very visual person. I actually have something wrong with my visual perception which is a vestige of having seizures when I was a young child. As such, I have never given much credence to the idea that I could be a designer or a visual artist. When I decided to take my website seriously. though, I knew I had to stop ripping images off the internet. I resigned myself to learning how to make them and I was very, very overwhelmed.

Here is the first image that I made for myself:

Pretty terrible, right? I made it in powerpoint.

I was surfing the internet looking for a better way to create images when I found CANVA and my whole world changed. I used to make all of the images on this website (now I have a graphic designer who does them all)! I recognize that they are not earth shattering… but I did show my website to my fancy web designer friend so she could give me advice and she said “Well, you have really great imagery on the site, but you need X, Y and Z.” I was so busy feeling warm and fuzzy about my images that I skipped the part where I felt bad about the things I haven’t figure out yet.

Now, I’m not perfect, for example- what was I thinking with this image? Is that a hand? Breadsticks? No one knows. But, overall I’m pleased with my nascent skills!

This being somewhat visually proficient has made me even more adventurous! My brother is a legitimate artist- he draws things on napkins that I would insist on putting in a frame. That, paired with my eyeball problem has made me very shy about drawing. But I saw this the other day and I thought it was so funny that I had to create it myself. So I did.

Here it is: Yes, I know they are stick figures. Sure, it’s kind of lame to be proud of some stick figures and to say things like “That’s a pretty believable pony tail!” But I am, and it is.

The point of all of this is to say:

I want you to stop worrying about how long things will take. Stop pondering how old you’ll be when you can actually do it.

Just START.

Dip your toe in.

Do it badly!

And celebrate your progress! You won’t arrive, because that’s not a real thing… instead you’ll realize that life is FUN and RICH and AWESOME not because you’ll collect a wall of trophies, but because you learned something new.

You took your dreams seriously and you made a little progress.

And here’s the kicker: over time, as you learn a little bit here and make a little progress there you WILL wake up to discover that you created a life for yourself that you love and that others admire.